Buffett confident no one will have perfect ballot

Warren Buffett looks at his offer to pay $1 billion to anyone who fills out a perfect NCAA tournament bracket as nothing more than a matter of having the numbers in his favor.

Mathematicians say he’s right. That’s still not stopping them from building a cottage industry by teaching bracket-fillers how to make the impossible seem possible — or a little less improbable.

Around a half-dozen college professors are offering special classes to teach people the ins and outs of the numbers that will, inevitably, work against them.

There are a few more than 9.2 quintillion combinations for a 64-team bracket. A quintillion is 1 million times 1 trillion — a 1 with 18 zeros behind it. If every possibility were filled out on its own sheet of paper, the weight of the paper would be 184 trillion tons — more than 500 million times the weight of the Empire State Building.

Bergen calculates that someone with knowledge of basketball — say, someone with the rudimentary smarts to go with every No. 1 seed in their first game, where they are 116-0 over the last 29 years — still only has a 128 billion-1 chance of being perfect.

Buffett’s contest is capped at 15 million entrants, so, Bergen says, if all 15 million sign up and they all have some knowledge of basketball, the odds are still 8,500-1 against a perfect bracket. That’s more than a 99.99 percent chance that everyone will get at least one game wrong.

Bergen says you’d have a better chance of buying one Mega Millions ticket and one Powerball ticket and winning both in the same week.

All of which reinforces the fact that about the only sure thing in March Madness is that there are no sure things.